When designing a product, or conducting market research, it is useful to gain an accurate and objective measure of the qualitative and/or quantitative reactions of a subject (e.g., a human subject) to a given product. For example, human taste testing is performed to obtain a measure of taste quality and/or palatability of test samples (e.g., foods, beverages, pharmaceuticals, nutriceuticals, etc.). Human taste testing typically requires large amounts of sample and large numbers of trained subjects in order to generate statistically relevant data. Testing conventionally uses 20-40 or more test subjects (e.g., human subjects) per test panel with each subject evaluating (e.g., consuming) a large amount of sample per analysis (e.g., 20, 30, 40 or more milliliters of sample solution). Therefore, generation of a working/testable amount of test sample needed for evaluation has remained a significant challenge. For example, a taste-active compound that is active in the mM range might need to be scaled to 10-100 s of grams for testing, which can be very costly, especially if the test article is a natural product. Human taste testing therefore remains time and resource intensive. Furthermore, due to predominant reliance on subjective verbal reports or rating scales for test measurement, human taste testing has been notoriously variable and inaccurate. Similar inefficiencies and inaccuracies exist for other types of human assessment testing as well.
Moreover, human taste testing has stagnated into a structure of testing and measurement that progressed from psychophysical methods originating over 100 years ago with little innovation since.